Act 1: From Linear Businesses to Aggregators and Back — Packy McCormick

A subtext to last week’s article, Tech’s Two Philosophies, was the idea that there is a difference between Aggregators and Platforms; this was the key section:It is no accident that Apple and Microsoft, the two “bicycle of the mind” companies, were founded only a year apart, and for decades had broadly similar business models: sure, Microsoft licen... See more

Every additional customer accrued a cost, whether that be the marginal cost of serving them or the opportunity cost of not serving a different customer. Given that, it was, as Christensen noted, perfectly rational to focus on the most profitable ones.However, something else momentous happened around 20 years ago: the emergence of the Internet. As I... See more

Level 1 Aggregators: Level 1 Aggregators acquire their supply; their market power springs from their relationship with users, but is primarily manifested through superior buying power. That means these aggregators take longer to build and are more precarious in the short-term.